


From Day To Day, His Journey

by be_themoon



Category: Torchwood
Genre: Character Study, Drabble Sequence, F/M, M/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-05-19
Updated: 2010-05-19
Packaged: 2017-10-09 14:18:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 870
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/88374
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/be_themoon/pseuds/be_themoon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ianto, from sadness to happiness, with stops at resignation and despair. Ianto/Jack, Ianto/Lisa. PG-13.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. left all the lights burning

_3… 2… 1…_

“Ianto, where - ” Jack says, and Ianto points to the rack on the wall where for the past three weeks he’s faithfully hung the car keys every time he finds them hanging around the Hub. “You’re one in a million,” Jack says gratefully, and grabs them and runs, Owen following behind, Tosh and Suzie already outside waiting.

Ianto counts down the minutes, finishing up the paperwork for filing J2-09176, which Jack tells him is an alien bracelet with no real function or purpose beyond beauty. There isn’t get enough of that, here at Torchwood, he thinks, and takes the bracelet and printed filing sheet with him. He’ll drop by and put it in the archive before he goes to see Lisa.


	2. but nobody's home

Gwen is lovely, and he can see the way Jack looks at her. His heart seizes, and he prays that he’s made himself indispensable enough that Jack’s see-through attempts at romancing her don’t jeopardize his own position here at Torchwood. He carries the coffee and spends an extra two hours cleaning the Hub that afternoon, almost on automatic as he worries his way through the day, through Jack’s cheerful delight at Gwen’s persistence and her heart.

He can’t lose his place here, not now, not after everything he’s given up, not after lying in Jack’s bed while he thinks of Lisa.


	3. took the stairs to the stars all alone

He doesn’t expect to, but he grows to love his job. They push off the archiving of the miscellany on him, and he builds his own cataloguing system from the ground up, pushing off of what Torchwood 1 had used. While the others coo over the guns and the defense systems and the other assorted weapons, he files away a set of six rings from a far-away planet that all had the word ‘sister’ carved on them in a language Ianto had to look up to translate. Tosh tells him once she’s sorry that he doesn’t get to handle the important things yet, and he just nods and smiles and slides the drawer shut. Six girls in one family – he can only imagine. They must have loved each other, he thinks. He misses Rhiannon.


	4. Ó lá go lá, mo thuras

The days immediately after hurt like hell. He gets up and goes to work, he avoids their gaze, he wonders how to tell them that they never earned his loyalty, don’t they see? Lisa did. Lisa fought, Lisa died, Lisa bled. He knows the incident hasn’t made his record. He left the paperwork to report it on Jack’s desk the next morning, but it was in the waste basket the next day. There’s a cynical part of his brain that’s scolding Jack for his lax business principles, and there’s part of him that’s just too tired to do anything but the job that he’s practically memorized and therefore thankful.


	5. see the beast he's made of you

Someone tries to lift his wallet one day. He doesn’t even think, just reacts. Elbow to side, arm to throat, knee to stomach. It almost hurts, to think of how he’s changed. He never meant to be like this – he did research at Torchwood 1, for god’s sake. He archives things, he drives the car, he puts the keys where they belong. But Torchwood 3 turns every day into a fight for survival, every moment a struggle, and in an environment like that you can’t help but learn things, even if you never wanted to.

He’s a good shot, these days.


	6. your blood is singing with his voice

You don’t choose who you fall in love with. Ianto never has, at least. First there was Lisa, and he’s never really figured out why. She was older, she was louder, she was confident and brash and beautiful and half a dozen other things he wasn’t. But he’d loved her almost from the moment he saw her, and he never really stopped, not even when the remnants of her tried to kill him.

And now there’s Jack, and if he fell in love more slowly and more reluctantly this time, he can still tell that it’s love, and even when he hates it he can’t help it.


	7. happiness hit you like a train

He used to wake up in the morning and dread the whole day. The odd parts of his job that he loved weren’t enough to keep him from worry and anger over the parts he didn’t. Smiling at Jack felt like a chore most days, and picking up after Suzie was never anything but frustrating. Owen was practically a menace to civilized society some days, and Tosh was terrifying if you tried to clean up her desks, despite her mild manners the rest of the time. It was easy to remember those things as the norm and forget Tosh smiling and patiently organizing her papers so that he would know which ones he could throw out, or Owen insisting that you needed a physical because he was worried about you and wouldn’t admit it, or Suzie calling him over to show him her latest discovery, smiling radiantly and so pleased when he was interested. Even with his secrets lost, it’s still easy to forget that he doesn’t have to be worried anymore.

But one day, he grabs his coat to go weevil hunting and somewhere between his desk and the door realizes that he’s happy.


End file.
